a part of the city where i never go

my dentist works up the street from where i went to high school. every nine months i come back for a cleaning. i take the 41 from keele station, up old weston road to eglinton, and step into a throng of northbound commuters outside the coffee time on the corner. i have only a vague idea of where they might be going; york university, for some, the old hospital on keele street. there is a plaza at lawrence with a walmart, and a few government offices further north at the 401, near the centre where i keep failing my driver's test.

the murals we painted on the side of a portuguese sports bar are still here. in the first, a ttc bus - one with parallelogram windows - speeds around a corner into a blue abyss of sky. in the second, a figure on horseback rides across a yellow-brick-road bridge. this one is on the side of another building, formerly occupied by a furniture liquidation centre. now its called "image beauty supply products."

the sidewalks have been repaved, but they're mottled with flattened wads of gum again and don't look much different. the school still hasn't managed to grow a lawn. it stands on the northwest corner like an aging monolith or a gravestone, and gives the impression of being seen in perpetual timelapse, clouds zooming by overhead.

the same jamaican papas sit outside their apartments, outside doorways tucked between the shops. their plastic lawn chairs bend, gleaming in the sun, slanting on the eglinton hill. on this hill we are closer to the sun, they are, and their dark skin is slick in the heat. from the top you can see forever, to what seem like the city's outskirts but must only be the beginnings of another city: mississauga, brampton. traffic moves at ten kilometres over the speed limit, like the buried water through the valley, past the panzerotto pizza and the jitz bar, the arena, the remains of the kodak plant.

i remember standing at all of these bus stops, and how different the buses smell here - like burnt, bleached paper. i remember the pride we had pulling into the rear parking lot in tyler's parents' bmw. the smoking pit, whose excavated earth reveals decades of cigarette stubs and fossilized potato wedge boxes. lunch at the court house, ketchup and mayonnaise, the sticky smell of chlorine from the centennial pool, and how all of the streets are named after world war II battlegrounds. the one girl who went to yale, and how everyone pretended they knew who she was.

the in-between, where no one is ever poorest but they've got no money to speak of. where no one seems to stay for long, except for the dentist, i guess. where the sky is bigger, and the houses and trees aren't new or old, but somewhere in the middle. where it was never as bad as it could get, and never good enough to stay for.

Robin Swicord on Writing-Directing

If you are a writer-director, choose as your collaborators (director of photography and editor especially) people with strong opinions. As a writer, your vision is already amply represented via the script. Your direction of your own work will be stronger if your choices are sometimes interrogated by an opposing view. A compliant collaborator merely leaves you stranded with your first idea--the work gets better when you are challenged to re-examine your ideas.

Go into prep and production as physically fit as possible. Prepping, shooting and editing are all ridiculously exhausting, in different ways. As your mother, let me stress this: Eat only healthy energy foods on set; catch up on sleep on weekends; exercise whenever you can on your days off. A film crew is a traveling Petri dish of viruses and colds. Take simple measures not to catch what is going around. Otherwise you will be sick for months, because you’ll never catch enough sleep to get well.

Wear comfortable shoes.

Express gratitude constantly. Your crew deserves it.

Rehearse with a sense of play, not with a goal of having the actors deliver a performance during rehearsal. Actors are astute emotionally. They delve into the text with the skill of detectives. A director can be their sounding board, but ideally you want the actors to invest in their roles with a sense of ownership, and then to relax and be at play with each other. The director’s job is mostly to remove obstacles so that the actors can be released into play. Actors are not different from writers in this respect--they most love to inhabit what they have discovered for themselves. When that happens, it’s great for your movie.

When possible, bake cookies in the editing room. The aroma brings in random people who are happy to hang out and munch cookies while they look at a scene or two. Having “uninvested” people occasionally coming in and out of the editing room keeps you from getting so close to the work that you can’t see the effect of the changes you are making. Embrace the outside eye.

If you hear the same comment more than twice, pay attention. And remember that people almost always tend to identify symptoms rather than problems. “I was confused by that last scene” is a comment that may have nothing to do with the last scene--it may well be merely the symptom of a problem most likely lurking earlier in the film.

Good or bad, don’t read reviews. Good reviews or bad, they only make it harder to give yourself freely to the next movie you want to make.

It’s only a movie. Reconnect with your friends and family. Lie on the grass and look up at the sky.

DGG on Snow Angels

http://www.ifc.com/film/film-news/2008/03/david-gordon-green-on-snow-ang.php

http://www.moviemaker.com/acting/article/david_gordon_green_snow_angels_kate_beckinsale_20080307/

Annie's Appearance
Annie's House
Things That Make Annie Laugh
Annie's Likes/Dislikes
Annie's History
Things About Annie

http://www.cbc.ca/radiosummer/alien/

Alien Nation features dozens of teens from a wide range of backgrounds, speaking frankly and often surprisingly about spirituality, family, technology, friendship, love, sex and altered states.

http://www.filmmakermagazine.com/winter2003/features/magic_hours.php

Kathy H.

"... I'll have to admit I'll welcome the chance to rest- to stop and think and remember. I'm sure it's at least partly to do with that, to do with preparing for the change of pace, that I've been getting this urge to order all these old memories. What I really wanted, I suppose, was to get straight all the things that happened between me and Tommy and Ruth after we grew up and left Hailsham. But I realise now just how much of what occurred later came out of our time at Hailsham, and that's why I want first to go over these earlier memories quite carefully. Take all this curiosity... for instance. At one level, it was just us kids larking about. But at another, as you'll see, it was the start of a process that kept growing and growing over the years and it came to dominate our lives."

Never Let Me Go
Kazuo Ishiguro

august 2003 (age 14)

I want to be like Robinson Caruso
words blunt and
little boy little tom-girl (all girls are Toms)
adventurer.
I want to be about apples and
skinned knees.
Blowing bubbles and pulling
sling-shots at the trees.
I want to be Swiss Family Robinson, making
houses out of air
swinging pails and weaving ropes
feeling mud between the creases of my
skin.
I want to be about hunting for food and
accomplishment with knives.
I want to be the Boy within.
I want to be like Mark Twain solitude with
Rabbits and
pulling weeds.
That's it. (That must be it)
I want to be about growing
and pulling
weeds.
This little adventure girl within wants to be
all she was told she couldn't be, she wants to
eat the worms and mark the skin.
She wants to be fighting Lord of the Flies
straps holding wooden swords on
wild cries and
bloody arms.
I want to find Tom and claim her as my name.
I want to make sure that my daughter knows
her name is Tom; her second name will always
be Tom.

"A great work of literature communicates by being very, very specific. God is in the details, said Darwin, and so is art."

- Ann-Marie MacDonald

" [Laura's death in The Blind Assassin] also takes place only a few blocks west and south of the street on the edge of Leaside where Margaret Atwood herself discovered the power of ravines. In 1948, when she was nine, her family settled near the southeastern corner of Mount Pleasant Cemetery. At the end of the street behind her house, a footbridge led toward a patch of the peculiar ravine wildness that defines Toronto, especially for children. As Rosemary Sullivan says in her book The Red Shoes: Margaret Atwood Starting Out, "Margaret could climb down through dense underbrush into the Moore Park Ravine, which snaked through the east side of the city" -- and connected directly with what may now become famous as the setting of Laura's death. Sullivan quotes Atwood's note on the ravines, written years later: "To go down into them is to go down into sleep, away from the conscious electrified life of the houses. The ravines are darker, even in the day."

- robert fulford
http://www.robertfulford.com/Ravines.html

that peculiar quality...

Gus Van Sant's recent Paranoid Park is an impressive example of using non-professional actors to capture the essence of childhood/naivete. Formal elements: speed ramping, longshot, steadicam, exposure fluctuation, timelapse, super8/35mm.

He also does a great job at painting this clouded, almost mystical portrait of Portland. I feel as thought it speaks to the reverence we have for our childhoods - the places we went, things we did become etchings. This isn't to say our memory isn't true to reality but rather that we colour things in, distort, edit.

"Like many of Van Sant’s films, Paranoid Park throbs with the underlying threat of violence, yet it is, undeniably, an exploration of innocence. Alex possesses that peculiar quality of childhood which distances him from his own mortality; it’s what makes him able to appreciate the scandent ascent and careening descent of the skateboard. In some ways, the film is a celebration of that freedom, and perhaps a glance back for Van Sant to his own youth, the days of his first Super-8 forays into the art form. It is also a movie about boyhood disillusionment. Even at the celebrated Paranoid Park, a sloping cement landscape appropriated from beneath a highway overpass, Alex is unable to skateboard. He tells people he isn’t good enough, but actually Alex is too burdened to be weightless."

http://www.filmjournal.com/filmjournal/reviews/article_display.jsp

Toronto's Ravines: Walking the Hidden Country
By Murray Seymour. Boston Mills Press, 2000.

http://www.toronto.ca/trees/ravines.htm
City of Toronto: ravine history and use, bylaws, photography

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/series/outsiders/
A series of articles and photos exploring Toronto's hidden ravine-dwellers

http://spacing.ca/ravines.htm

minus time

"A few faint lights and voices drifted out of other houses. Why did inviting someone to trust you necessarily mean you had to reveal everything, give up the power to re-create yourself? Why did people act as if revelation always equaled honesty...?" / PG 150

"She told us, whenever she went away, to a conference or on a camping trip in Algonquin Park by herself, how much she enjoyed missing us: It was a kind of love, she savoured it like a taste. If we listened, couldn't we feel it, like a pulse, our missing her, her missing us? She said it was important for everyone to know how to go off by themselves, to stretch the edges of their own skin, to test themselves in solitude or darkness." / PG 184

- catherine bush